The Age of Zeus

PART 2

I t seemed that she had had a family for a while, briefly. A man who'd shared her bed, a childlike thing that had been dependent on her, partners who'd been like brothers and sisters, even a father figure, self-serving and untrustworthy though he'd turned out to be. It seemed that she had been happy in her life with these quasi-kin, although some of them had died and that had brought a measure of sadness.

Their home had been an underground warren, the polar opposite of the Olympians' mountaintop eyrie. From the darkness they had emerged to scrap with that other ersatz family and had shown them they were not the apex predators they thought they were. Those weeks of that existence, it had been a grand time. Often terrifying, just as often exhilarating. There had been laughter and despair.

It had been like living.

But now it was all over.

It was definitely all over.

Kensal Rise was grey and stagnant. Summer kept not quite coming to London. Every day began with a warm morning which never managed to catch alight and blaze. Noon clouds would gather, the sunshine would fade, the air would cool. The Met Office put on a brave face, cheerily promising better weather ahead, but it didn't come and behind the forecasters' grins there was desperation and disappointment. They took it personally. They wished they could do better. Like the national cricket team, currently getting trounced in the Ashes. Like Catesby Bartlett's government, already starting to renege on last year's election promises. Letting the country down.

As if any of these things were surprises.

Sam, in a desultory fashion, busied herself. The house, neglected and unoccupied since January, needed spring cleaning and sprucing up. The neighbours hadn't kept an eye on the back garden as they'd agreed to, so it was now a mass of weeds and parched unwatered plants and the shaggy lawn was dotted with half a ton, give or take, of fox excrement. She was out there every morning with hoe and rake and rubber gloves, restoring life and order and hygiene. She read books. She watched too much daytime TV, "too much" meaning "any." She trudged along to the shops on Chamberlayne Road and trudged back again with just enough groceries for today and tomorrow. On several occasions she picked up her mobile and speed-dialled DI Prothero's private line, only to stop before the number reached its last digit. Once, she got as far as listening to the dial tone trill twice, before hitting Disconnect. She wouldn't have minded hearing his voice, even if it had only been his voicemail message. Those roundly singsong Swansea syllables that conveyed a lilt of warmth, however chilly the message of the words they comprised. She missed it. Missed him. Prothero, however, she was sure, had moved on. She doubted he ever even thought about his one-time protegee now. He had a new DS, someone else to chide and coax and mould. She was on her own. As she had been before. As, perhaps, she had always been.

She watched the news. Of course she did. Assiduously, religiously. BBC Breakfast, the ITN lunchtime bulletin, Channel 4 News in the evening. Like a monk observing matins, sext and vespers.

Nothing.

Nothing about the Titans.

The Olympians were keeping quiet too. There would the odd sighting of one of them every now and then. Hephaestus, say, visiting an Athens scrapheap to gather car parts and other metal detritus, for reasons he wouldn't divulge; Artemis fulfilling a longstanding commitment to attend the ceremony announcing the winner of the bid to hold the next Olympic Games (this time round, as it happened, the lucky bidder was the New Democratic People's Republic of North Korea). Other than that, they maintained a low profile, and some observers commented and other commentators observed that with Hermes still missing in action the Olympians were getting out and about much less. Not for them any more the luxury of instantaneous teleportational travel to any point on the globe. Instead, the slight indignity of flights on private chartered aircraft, although at least they were always waved straight through at customs and never asked to present passports or visas. They were Olympians. Who was going to query their travel credentials?

The Japanese navy, such as it was, completed its exercises in the Med. As Landesman had predicted, all five ships travelled far up into the Aegean to the Thermaikos Gulf, bringing them within spitting distance of Olympus. A well-aimed missile from the Takanami — class destroyer the JDS Inazuma Maru could have reached the Pantheonic stronghold some 20-odd kilometres inland, not that the weapon would have been permitted to complete its journey had it been fired. After sailing in circles for several days without getting sunk, the fleet turned for home with everyone on board, from admiral to lowliest rating, astonished and delighted to still be alive. The Greek navy — one frigate, the HS Plataia — played escort down through the Cyclades, politely but pointedly showing the Japanese the way out.

At the newsagent's on the corner, Sam's eye was caught by a headline one morning. It was on the front cover of the Daily Mail, a paper that liked to take an occasional libertarian poke at the Pantheon when it was feeling brave.